Multilitteratus Incognitus

ChatGPT Patch of the Wise Owl Recently, I've been playing around with image generation in ChatGPT, not so much to create output that I plan on using seriously for something (although some output do end up on this blog as post images), but more to see how easy (or hard) it is to get something from my mind's eye into some kind of machine output.  I am also curious to see how the LLM interprets what I input (that element of surprise). I only really have the free credits that OpenAI gives to its free users, to my experimentation is basically 10-15 minutes of futzing around while watching TV in the evening. As I was playing around the other day, this scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation came to mind. In Schisms ,   the crew had been abducted by an alien race but had no memory of it (think Alien Encounters of the Third Kind ). As they start to remember small elements of their experience, they all try to piece together their memories so that they can come up with a reconstr...

  If only it weren't for those darned kids! Admittedly I haven't been blogging a lot these days. I keep meaning to come back and actually get into the habit of writing more frequently, but as one of my Twitter acquaintances once observed, you make a note of it to come back to, but then lose motivation (loosely paraphrasing Matt Crosslin - I think).  In any case, à propos of TurnItIn's announcement this past week that they will now have an AI writing detector and AI writing resource center for educators  as part of their offerings (wooooo! /s), I thought I'd spend a few minutes jotting down some thoughts. Warning: I am a  bit of a Dr. Crankypants on this one... If you haven't been paying attention, the early research is out on these kinds of detector schemes. People have been playing around with ChatGPT and AI author detectors and the results are in. These detectors just aren't good. Even GPTZero "The World's #1 AI Detector" (🙄) isn't all that ...

This week a new collaborative article was published in the Asian Journal of Distance Education  titled " Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape ." Our friend and colleague Aras Bozkurt invited us to participate in a piece using speculative methodology, something new to me, to explore positive, and not so positive, narratives around the use of AI in education. I love collaborating on this type of output because I learn so much both from engaging in the experience as well as from other participants (and there were 36 of us in this endeavor).  It was great to be in the same academic and social mindspace with old friends and acquaintances from past collaborations, as well as work with new folks. The published document is 78 pages long, so a short book if we consider page breaks between stories and perhaps some illustrations, which the original article doesn't have, but someone in our c...

Well OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but it's quite interesting. I thought that for the last post of May it would make sense to close the month with something linguistics related given that this semester was all linguistics all the time :-) I was reading this article on Slate called There's No Klingon Word for Hello . I honestly didn't expect it to be so interesting! For instance I did not know that Klingon was a completely developed language, grammar an all! The following really surpised me: But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling ...